iPhone Article Zone

Pocket Labeler

Photo editing on the iPhone is big business. The App Store, for reasons unknown to me, is lined with photo editing apps trying to make something out of your severely underpowered iPhone camera. There are about five million flashes, zooms, color adjustments, and such, but in my opinion, these apps are really missing the point of the camera. Aspiring photographers really aren’t using the iPhone as their camera in droves, particularly the 3G which doesn’t even have image stabilization. People are using the iPhone camera to take quick memories when they are out and don’t have time to pull out a real camera. They are also using the cameras for fun to send around goofy pictures to friends and family. These are the niches that the guys at More Blu Sky try to fill.

Pocket Labeler, the latest photo editing app from the guys at More Blu Sky, is a bit like their last app, Ransom Letters, but with a bit more polish and a better UI. The app basically consists of not a photo editor in the color correction sense, but a way to make photos more fun by adding words. Like the title implies, Pocket Labeler adds labels to pictures, much like you would do with a pocket labeler.

The UI is fairly straightforward and does just about everything that you would expect the app to do. Once you type in your labels, you can pinch and twist your way into making each label as large as you want and at any angle that you deem necessary. While you’re at it, you can choose between any of the eight label color options to give your picture just a bit more flair. Nobody likes plain black or white labels anyway. Once you are done with each photo, you can send it off by e-mail, to Facebook, or straight to a Flickr stream. You can also save it to your camera roll, but sharing is caring guys. Don’t hoard your pictures.

The overall build quality of Pocket Labeler is very nice, instantly putting it in the upper echelon of funny photo apps. It’s obvious from the get-go that the app isn’t just a garbage app that the developers pumped out for a quick buck, it is a well thought out app that does what it claims to do very well. Obviously the app isn’t for everybody, but if you happen to enjoy sending random labeled pictures to your writers on a daily basis (like me), this one is definitely for you.

NewsAlert

If you want news custom-tailored to your liking, you should look at NewsAlert. This news app delivers news based solely on your specified keywords, presumably saving you the trouble of wading through RSS feeds. For the most part, it’s a solid experience, and the app pulls from a wide array of sources to make it worth your while.

The first thing you’ll want to do is pick some keywords. The app suggests keeping tabs on your favorite bands or your hometown as well as traditional keywords (i.e., “education”). These keywords then appear as list items in the main view. Whenever NewsAlert finds a new article relating to one of your keywords, you receive a push notification. The app tracks all of the articles that come in, and then you can view them based on the tag. You get 10 keywords to use, with more available via in-app purchase.

The viewer itself is nothing special—like most in-app web browsers, it’s slower than Safari and some of the screen space is wasted by the app itself. Pinch-to-zoom is also a bit jerky. I wish that opening articles in Safari could be selected as the default action (it’s still there, but it takes a few button taps.)

For the most part, getting news articles based on keywords is a good experience. It’s not perfect, however; too often, I get duplicate articles when major events happen. I don’t need to read the results from the latest Maryland basketball game ten times…in fact, I wish I could filter sports results out of my “Maryland” keyword altogether, but that’s not an option. Still, the app does turn up some interesting articles. I wouldn’t rely on it as my sole source of news, but as an addition to my daily routine, it works. It also works particularly well if you’re tracking an artist rather than a general keyword, because then you’re more likely to get interesting interviews or news about albums or tours.

It’s ultimately your call whether or not a simple dollar is worth getting keyword-specific news. The app is well-built, so no complaints there. For me, this is more of a novelty app than a real news source—I’ll stick with my old-fashioned RSS, because I like reading from specific sites. But if you’re the type who needs news on a specific topic from a variety of sources, NewsAlert won’t disappoint. It all depends on your individual needs.

Cocoto Magic Circus

Admittedly, I’ve never played one of the Cocoto series games before this one. The Cocoto series currently features Cocoto Kart Racing Online, Cocoto Kit for Kids, and this newest title, Cocoto Magic Circus. The storyline elements in the Cocoto series seem a bit hard to follow within the game, but from the game I can tell that there is a fairy princess that gets kidnapped by a clown, and it’s up to Cocoto and his friends to shoot their way through the various levels of the magic circus to save the fairy princess. The developer offers a more detailed explanation of the storyline in the App Store if you would like to know more.

Cocoto Magic Circus is a solid tap to shoot arcade style game that is filled with various mini-games. All of these mini-games lead you to the one ultimate goal, saving the fairy princess. Cocoto Magic Circus’s premise is fairly straight forward, if not cliché at this point, and the controls are extremely simplistic. It takes a little bit of hand eye coordination, but I found my play through was not overly difficult, and in total I had to replay two levels.

There are three difficulty settings in Arcade Mode. I was a master of easy, imagine that, but got significantly rocked in hard mode. Anyone looking for a good challenge will find Cocoto Magic Circus’s hard mode to provide that challenge. At the end of every level, your score is compared to the overall high score of the world as well. I can only hope it was because I was on easy, that my scores seemed to fall so far under the rest of the worlds. It couldn’t have anything to do with my lack of serious shooting skills. That would never be the case.

Regardless of my shooting prowess, this most recent installment in the Cocoto series provides a great experience, and while not being extremely long, it is in fact a lot of fun. The games vary from shooting creatures as they move towards the fairy princess, a matching style game where you race the clock to shoot as many matched cards as you can in the time limit, and a whole slew of other unique games that help to limit the overall repetitiveness of the game. Just about the time I was beginning to get restless, the final battle was fought, and the fairy princess saved.

Graphically, Cocoto Magic Circus is easy on the eyes. It provides an excellent medium to deliver the fun and simplistic game play that this title has to offer. It comes complete with opening and game completion cut scenes. The clown pops up before each match, which depending on the age you first saw Steven King’s “It“, might be terrifying. I’m no fan of clowns, but the small size of the iPod allowed me to muster the courage to carry on.

Cocoto provides a lot enjoyment during play through, and is a great title for those interested in using their finger as a virtual gun. In certain levels, it felt that there were some issues with where I shot versus where the game had registered my shot, but that could be a simple calibration. That aside, the game felt well polished, and I didn’t feel that the game mechanics held me back from enjoyment in anyway.

Magic Circus does provide a multiplayer mode. At the time of review, however, I was unable to find people online to interact with. It wasn’t prime game playing time, however, so it’s quite possible that you’ll be able to find people online at certain times of day.

You can check Cocoto Magic Circus out in the app store for $0.99.

Fly, Kiwi, Fly!

Fly, Kiwi, Fly! is a light-hearted go-the-distance game featuring a flightless bird, lots of upgrades, and a trip around the world. You play a stubborn kiwi who’s hell-bent on learning to fly. As you add more upgrades to your kiwi’s arsenal, the game soon becomes a challenge to earn as many wacky achievements and fly as far as possible. It’s a great pick-up-and-play game, and the cheery humor is enough to keep me coming back.

The game itself is simple enough. Your kiwi starts running headlong off a cliff; you tap a button to make him leap into the air. At that point, you can use your other items. At first, you’ll have nothing, and the kiwi crashes to the ground, but you can soon purchase gliders, rockets, and launching systems like a cannon in order to send your kiwi ever farther from home. Gliders allow you to soar; rockets chew through fuel but give you a powerful (if temporary) boost to speed, and launching systems give you your initial boost. Items like pogo sticks can also be purchased using the cash you earn from flying.

Ostensibly, the goal is just to fly the longest distance possible, but there’s more to it than that. The game world is divided into countries, with different scenery and new achievements becoming available once you reach a new one. Extra fuel and money bags are scattered in the sky. You earn additional money for performing stunts, collecting the money bags, and earning achievements. These achievements range from the “Kamikaze” award (crash from 100mts high without gear) to “Frigate Bird” (exceed 270mts) to unlocking new “countries.” You’re also awarded dollars based on distance.

The result is a vicious cycle of one-more-time: “I’ll just do one more flight so I can buy that catapult…ooh, shiny, just let me test the catapult once before I put this down…oh, but I was so close to reaching Italy!…” Yeah. It gets addicting pretty quickly.

It doesn’t hurt that the controls work extremely well. At first, I had a tough time figuring out how to control my kiwi—the direction of your flight is tilt-based, and I couldn’t get it to work. Finally, I hit the pause button mid-flight, and lo and behold: calibration options! I set my sensitivity to Medium, switched the control axis to horizontal, and calibrated it with my iPod standing straight up. The resulting scheme was easy to control, which is saying a lot for an accelerometer-based game.

As for the sound and graphics, both are pretty good. I love the cute kiwi, and the cartoony graphics are just fine. The music is a bit iffier. The in-flight tune is good, but I could do without the menu’s soundtrack.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take too long for you to circle the world and reach the space shuttle at the end, and once you max out on upgrades, there’s not much left to do. It’s still a fun game to play, but the drive to continue peters out. Even then, though, Fly, Kiwi, Fly! is still a good quick-play game and a fun diversion. Just don’t expect anything too deep, and you should enjoy helping this formerly flightless bird achieve his lifelong dream!

Doodle Blast!

I’m a big advocate of the doodle movement. From Doodle Jump to Doodle Army, anything that looks hand drawn does it for me. Where does it stop though? Minimalist style is a fantastic concept, but amazing looks have to be paired with inspired gameplay to really be fantastic. That is where Doodle Jump succeeds, and where many of the others, such as Doodle Blast! don’t.

As expected, Doodle Blast! is a fantastic looking Doodle Game. In fact, it may be the smoothest, most polished doodle game yet. The interface is rock solid, including the incredibly smooth and unexpectedly nice tutorial slides. Once you get into the game, you are treated with some fantastic hand drawn graphics that quickly evolve into insanity. There is stuff flying all round the screen, you have missiles shooting all over the place, enemies are coming at you from the air and the ground, and never does the game look like an incomprehensible mess. For the genre, the graphics may be as good as they can possibly get.

The issue with Doodle Blast! is that while the graphics never look like an incomprehensible mess, the gameplay quickly devolves into one. You start the game as a simple tank on a quest to get as far as you can while blowing up literally everything in your path. Trees, tanks, people, jets, helicopters… everything. Every once in awhile, a box will parachute down that you can tap on to upgrade your tank, eventually turning yourself into a tower of machine gun shooting, missile firing mayhem.

At first, when you are just a wee little tank, the game is fun. You can hear the tank sound and all of the enemies coming at you have their own little personalities. Killing enemies is as easy as touching them, causing your tank to fire a cool looking tank blast. After a few minutes of play though, you’ll just be tapping all over the screen, and after a few upgrades you’ll have so many weapons are firing at once that your head will spin. When you get hit enough, pieces of your tank will fall off, and eventually you will blow up when you’ve taken some random amount of damage. Each time you play, the game has the same build up and finale. It’s just madness.

The hardest part of giving Doodle Blast! a mediocre review is that people will start the game up, see the amazing style, and say “Chris Hall doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. There is just no real gameplay involved, and no real strategy to make you feel like you are getting better with more play. Because of the frantic nature, you’ll never get that “a-ha” moment that you should get when the game finally clicks. Doodle Blast! will definitely be fun for a few minutes here and there, but I just can’t see people coming back to it after a few plays.

Zombie Cannon Carnage

Zombie Cannon Carnage is a very tough game to review. The game oozes style, more so than just about any other game in the store, but there really isn’t very much to do. I’ve come to a point though with app pricing to where I just don’t know how much I should expect from a game that costs a dollar. I can go to McDonald’s and eat a dollar burger in about a minute without feeling full at all. That dollar burger though feels like the deal of the year. Food for a dollar! I’ll get 5! When apps are a dollar though, people start checking their bank accounts to make sure that they will still be on track to retire at 65.

So this time I’m going to look at an app for what it is. Zombie Cannon Carnage doesn’t want to be your entire meal, it just wants to be that perfect bowl of pre-dinner guacamole. To complete my analogy I should probably have something represent dinner, but I’ve got nothing. Much like your favorite guacamole, Zombie Cannon Carnage looks fantastic, plays great for awhile, but really doesn’t do much for an aftertaste.

The game really is just a mixture of catapult launching with a stair dismount style, pain maximizing point system. You start with your zombie inside of a canon. The story says that you are in a cannon because “with no other options, a fierce need to feed and a couple of spare circus parts they (the zombies) quickly build a cannon in a brilliant attempt to fire themselves back into space. This plan will never work, but at the very least they can save some hapless and unfortunate humans along the way and then eat their brains.” So you shoot yourself at a trajectory or your choice and try to maximize your damage.

Once the cannon is shot, you are given thrust controls that will propel you further through the level in an effort to hit as much as possible, and once your zombie can’t take anymore pain, you can self destruct… multiple times, causing even more hurt upon the poor city below. Because the developers are kind, they give you three tries at this destructive task, giving you money to upgrade yourself between each. You can upgrade your cannon to shoot further, upgrade your fuel to self destruct better, armor to take more hits before you have to self destruct, and bonus items to help you blow up more along the way.

As I’ve said before, the overall style in Zombie Cannon Carnage is top notch. The graphics are grimy in the best sort of way, and while the text is sparse, it is all really funny and used perfectly. My only complaint here is that there is not enough of it. In fact, there was not enough of anything. Continuing my guacamole analogy, Zombie Cannon Carnage is like the best kind of guacamole at the fanciest of restaurants. It’s amazing, but there is just a little dollop. Levels are over far too fast, not really grasping their full fun potential, and the writing, while amazing, just isn’t there enough. I’d love to see some kind of story mode included, just to give the game a bit more meat. I want more avocado in my guacamole, I just can’t help it.

You’ll end up spending a decent amount of time unlocking all three zombie characters and hitting all the in game goals, but after that, the game is done. When I say done, I don’t mean done in the sense that you’ll pick it up in a week, I mean that it is done. Unless some game depth updates are made, after an hour or two of gameplay, you’ll be happy, but very through with it. Back to my original point though, at 99 cents, how much game do you really expect? Next time you’re at McDonald’s, skip one of the buggers and get Zombie Cannon Carnage, you’ll be a much happier person.

Man this review made me hungry.